ChristianGovernance question #1: Why was this case before the civil courts instead of before the church courts?
OneNewsNow – November 29, 2010
Former Muslim guilty of embezzling church money
By Becky Yeh
As a former administrator at a California church is scheduled to serve jail time for embezzling nearly $1 million from the ministry, a lawyer says the incident should be a warning sign to other churches. Farrukh Ahmed of Ontario pleaded no contest on November 18 at the Chino Superior Court after the former administrator at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills was caught by a staff member with cash in his hand last December. Ahmed has been free on bail since his arrest, but authorities estimate Ahmed embezzled around $750,000 from the church between 2006 and 2009.
Brad Dacus, founder of the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), believes full restitution should be made to the church. “When individuals engage in this kind of criminal conduct, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he contends. “This individual should be required to repay every penny that [he has] wrongfully taken.”
Church pastor Jack Hibbs, whom Dacus describes as one of the most discerning pastors he knows, told the Contra Costa Times in January that Ahmed is a Pakistani-born Muslim who immigrated to the United States and converted to Christianity. But the PJI founder thinks other pastors should be more skeptical of those they ordain in their churches. “This should be a wake-up call, and the lesson to be shown here is that if it can happen at his church, it could happen anywhere,” he warns.
Ahmed, 48, is required to surrender to officials on January 7, which is when he is to begin serving his nine-month jail sentence and repaying $25,000 to the church.
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It wasn’t before civil court, it was before criminal court. And that’s where it belongs because embezzling is a crime.
Churches don’t get to preside over criminal matters. As the Catholics have shown churches are not immune to judging in favor of the church and not in favor of the public good.
Civil as distinct from church, not civil as distinct from criminal. No it does not necessarily belong in criminal court. You deny the authority of Scripture as God’s word, so you’re not going to conclude the same way, so I’m not going to debate with your dependence on a bankrupt secularist court system by two Christian parties. I simply comment to clear up the confusion re. def. of “civil.”
Yes I do deny the Scripture of Gods Word, at least as far as judging criminals. Justice needs to be based on verifiable fact, not authoritative superstition.
It’s fine for individuals to use religion as a moral compass (so long as they stay within the law) but the state cannot judge based on anything less than verifiable fact.
Exactly. That’s why we need Christian governance.
Primevil,
Perhaps before any non-Christian needlessly gets their dander up, they simply need to omit any personal prujudices toward religious matters and simply see the victim (the particular church) as having the preroggative to proceed with a charge, or not, before dealing with it out-of-court. The matter turns criminal after a plaintiiff (crown or private) seeks to indict. As for the church: they are usually incorporated into non-profit constitutional entities that must adjudicate on matters that effect to integrity of the churches own covenants with members, officials, and staff. Sometimes these matters are ethical, and sometimes these are procedural. These are ecclesiastical ‘courts’ of a sort which are taught in 1 Corinthians 5 and have been recognized by state powers since the Edict of Milan (312 A.D), and are well entrenched in the English common law legal tradition.
Religion isn’t and hasn’t been merely a “moral compass”. That’s just what you claim as your personal feeling and preference. This opinion mimicks Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in his work The Critique of Pure Reason where he invents a separation between the noumenal and phenominal realms – exactly what you dicotemize as “superstition” vs. “verifiable fact”.
Well – who says you’re right? You? Immanuel Kant? Who says your premise is right? Any answer you dream up about “rightness” will relegate you as preaching from the noumenal. You will then be caught in your own trap. Rightness is of the superstitious nature, not something of cold hard “verifiable fact.”
“…the intelligence of the intelligent I [God] will frustrate. Where is the wise? Where is the scholar, where is the philosopher of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1Corintians 1:19b-20)
@RRC
In many crimes it’s not up to the victims of crime to rule against the perpetrators, the purpose of the justice system is to protect the public from criminals, not to simply hand out punishment. Too often victims allow crimes to go unchecked for a number of reasons and that criminal moves on to repeat their crimes. Allowing fraud prosecution to be decided by the “victim” sets up a system where one co-hort acts as the “embezzling” party and the other as the “victim”. The embezzler gets caught and the victim lets them go free only to collect a payment after the fact. It becomes nearly impossible to prosecute.
Who is to say I’m right? I don’t make factual claims that aren’t verifiable and testable, that’s who. I’m not always right, but I correct my errors and move on. I don’t parrot a failed position until people simply give in out of fatigue.
If we allow Churches to settle matters with biblical law, we open a dangerous precedent to allow other faiths to bypass secular law for their own religious rule. I for one would rather not see Sharia Law gain any stronger foothold.